By chance, the war coincided with a pay strike by the journalists' union so, on the evening of May 2, only a dozen executives, including me, were producing the paper when the first genuinely dramatic war news broke. A news agency reported that the General Belgrano had been hit. Wendy Henry shouted "Gotcha!", not as a suggested headline but as a spontaneous reaction, the kind of black joke common to every newspaper office. MacKenzie seized on it and designed a front page which said: "GOTCHA. Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser." The first edition was off stone before more detailed news of the Belgrano's sinking arrived.

It dawned on us that there might have been a huge loss of life, and as Petrie read the agency reports aloud, the mood changed. Realising that "Gotcha" might be inappropriate, MacKenzie drew up another front page with a new headline: "Did 1,200 Argies drown?" The Sun's owner, Rupert Murdoch, happened to walk on to the floor as MacKenzie was completing the new layout and said he didn't see the need to replace "Gotcha". MacKenzie disagreed and subsequent editions carried the less controversial line.

Without a strike, it's likely that the original page one would have been altered so quickly that few copies would have left the building. But the time it took to make the change ensured that hundreds of thousands of the first edition were published and "Gotcha" came to symbolise ever after the Sun's, and MacKenzie's, cynical, jingoistic, bloodthirsty war coverage.

Despite his change of heart, MacKenzie happily embraced the legend of "Gotcha". Indeed, the day after the Belgrano's sinking, the Sun's front page, "ALIVE! Hundreds of Argies saved from Atlantic", played down the fact that 368 men were killed.

Jo, I'm afraid the fine points of your post were somewhat lost on me, though I do see that Gotcha isn't just the best headline for a battle report. But: who is/was General Belgrano; I take it that Wendy Henry is/was an employee of the paper and MacKenzie the editor; who or what are Argies?And, what on earth is a hole cruiser? That sounds like somebody's looking for holes in the ocean!

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